This Background is intended to provide the basic context of this patent application and it is not intended to describe a specific problem to be solved.
When debugging software errors, it is impossible to accurately analyze and mine patterns in the error information without accurate symbols. Symbol files are data files that contain information about the application programs with which they're associated. This information includes things like function names and their location in memory, global and local variable names and their location in memory, and source-code line information (this information lets each assembler command be mapped back to the line of source code associated with the command). This information is generated during compilation of the application program and is very useful for debugging the application program when it experiences a failure. There are multiple file formats for storage of symbols including Microsoft's Program database (PDB) files, but the discussion applies generally to all symbols formats. When debugging an application crash (either directly on the computer experiencing the crash) or via a memory dump or memory dumps from the computer, it is not possible to understand the trends and patterns in the crash (or across all crashes) without having correct debugging symbols for all of the loaded modules. Unfortunately since most software companies do not publish public symbols for their applications, the understanding and broad analysis of application crashes has been limited to software products that include symbols.